Which is why, when the US border patrol opened its doors to give journalists a tour of the facilities where it is temporarily housing thousands of children in nowhere near appropriate condition with nowhere else to go, those children became "detainees".
In fact, a number of individuals who, in the Bush years, would undoubtedly have become detainees there landed in federal court instead, including bin Laden's son-in-law, Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, and Abu Hamza al-Masri, an al-Qaeda operative accused of trying to build a terrorist cell in the United States.
Mohammed Refai became a detainee on Sept. 18, after federal investigators in Arkansas found documents that appeared to connect one of the terrorist hijackers, Saeed Alghamdi, with an apartment complex in Akron, Ohio.
Bagram eventually became notorious for detainee abuse, which included the killings in custody of at least two detainees there.
Mr Rumsfeld complied, and in the parlance of American prison guards Triple X became a "ghost detainee".
Afterwards, Slahi became a docile detainee, even striking up friendships with his guards.
With the charges, Mr. Nashiri became the 20th detainee at Guantánamo to face a possible war crimes trial.
Hicks became the first detainee out of hundreds who have gone through Guantanamo Bay to have his case adjudicated.
The man, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian, thus became the rare detainee facing similar charges in both the military and civilian courts for the same act.
Last year, Mr. Ghailani became the first detainee moved into the civilian system, where he faces trial soon in the 1998 conspiracy to bomb the United States Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, attacks that killed 224 people.
